Samaranch, Head of Olympics for 21 Years, Dies at 89

April 21 (Bloomberg) -- Juan Antonio Samaranch, who during
a 21-year tenure overseeing the Olympic Games dealt with
boycotts by the U.S. and the Soviet Union and a bribery scandal
tied to a host city, has died. He was 89.

He died today at a hospital in Barcelona after being
admitted April 18 with heart problems, according to Spain’s
Olympic committee.

Only Pierre de Coubertin, the Frenchman who founded the
modern Olympics, served a longer term than Samaranch, who was
president of the International Olympic Committee from 1980 to
2001. It was a turbulent two decades for the games and for
Samaranch, who faced criticism for his earlier participation in
the government of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Corporate sponsorship and television revenue soared during
his tenure, as did the desire of cities around the world to host
the games, which had endured a run of financial losses. The 2000
summer games in Sydney, the last under Samaranch, reaped
broadcast revenue of $1.3 billion. Sponsorship income rose more
than five-fold between 1988 and 2000.

“Thanks to his extraordinary vision and talent, Samaranch
was the architect of a strong and unified Olympic movement,”
the IOC’s current president, Jacques Rogge, said in a statement
today.

Detractors pointed to the increased use of drugs by
athletes and the gifts accepted by IOC members who were
considering applications to host the 2002 Winter Games.

Samaranch “wasn’t interested in the issue” of drug use,
Dick Pound, then-chief of the World Anti-Doping Agency, told
Reuters in 2007. Pound had served as a member of the IOC’s
executive board under Samaranch.

Defense on Drugs

Samaranch shot back that Pound was bitter because he had
lost his 2001 bid to become the next IOC president. Samaranch
said his commitment to fighting drugs was shown by the IOC’s
role in creating the anti-doping agency as well as the Court for
Arbitration for Sport, which handles disputes over alleged drug
use and other disciplinary matters.

He also pointed to the IOC’s decision to strip the gold
medal of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson at the 1988 Olympics
after a positive drug test. “The Johnson decision was the
beginning of a major fight in the war against doping,” he told
the newspaper El Pais in his final weeks as president in 2001.

Samaranch’s most trying stretch was when scandal arose from
how the organization, in 1995, awarded the 2002 Winter Games to
Salt Lake City. Subsequent investigations found that Salt Lake
City bid officials had given $1 million in gifts to IOC members
and their families. Ten IOC members were expelled or resigned.
U.S. lawmakers criticized Samaranch when he testified on the
scandal before Congress in December 1999.

World Traveler

Noted as a behind-the-scenes lobbyist, Samaranch visited
all 199 states or countries that made up the IOC membership
during his presidency. His home for much of the time was Suite
309 at the five-star Palace Hotel in Lausanne, the Swiss city
where the IOC is based.

Samaranch brought the Olympic Games to his hometown of
Barcelona in 1992. It revitalized the city’s port area and
infrastructure, lifted civic pride and boosted tourism for years
afterward. Asked once how he’d like to be remembered, Samaranch
said, “as someone who managed one day to bring the Olympic
Games to his country -- nothing more.”

Minutes before a 2009 vote to decide the 2016 host city,
Samaranch appealed to IOC members to pick Madrid, telling them,
“I know I am very near the end of my time.” In the voting, Rio
de Janeiro bested Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago.

Roles for Women

Among the vast changes under Samaranch’s leadership, the
IOC’s assets grew to $900 million in 2001 from $2 million in
1980, John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle wrote in their
“Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement.” The role of
women, both in the IOC and in Olympic competition, also grew
during his presidency, they said.

“In many ways,” they wrote, “Samaranch pushed the IOC
into the realities of the late-20th-century political and
economic life, earning in the process heated criticism from
those who believed that his policies trampled the original
ideals and meaning of the Olympic Movement as Coubertin
conceived it a century ago.”

Samaranch was born in Barcelona on July 17, 1920, the son
of a wealthy textile merchant.

He formed a roller-hockey league in 1943 and helped
Barcelona land the 1951 world championship competition. He
became a leading sports official under Franco’s dictatorship,
accompanying the Spanish delegation to Olympic competitions
starting in 1956. He joined the IOC in 1966 and became Spain’s
secretary for sports in 1967.

Two years after Franco’s death in 1975, King Juan Carlos
named Samaranch as ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Book Dispute

In their 1992 book, “The Lords of the Rings,” British
journalists Andrew Jennings and Vyv Simson portrayed Samaranch
as having been an active supporter of Franco and accused him of
corrupting the Olympic movement with secrecy and greed.

Samaranch had the IOC sue the journalists for criminal
libel. The writers didn’t attend the trial in Lausanne, at
which, according to an Associated Press account, Samaranch said
of his service under Franco: “I was a high-ranking civil
servant. It is wrong to say I organized the repression.”

The writers were found guilty in absentia and ordered to
serve five days in jail if they set foot in Lausanne.

“There were a lot of people like me who, because of the
circumstances, held positions of responsibility with Franco,”
Samaranch told sports daily Marca in 2004.

Fought Boycott

Samaranch won the IOC presidency in 1980, succeeding Lord
Killanin. He was voted in during the Moscow Games, which the
U.S. boycotted to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union retaliated by not sending athletes to the 1984
Games in Los Angeles.

Drawing on his diplomatic experience, Samaranch traveled
around the world and persuaded judges and officials from Soviet-bloc countries to attend the 1984 games, though he couldn’t get
the Soviet Union and its allies to abandon the boycott by their
athletes.

He was more successful in 1988, when North Korea boycotted
the games in Seoul. Samaranch persuaded other communist
countries not to join the boycott. And in 2000, he helped
persuade the two Koreas to march together at the opening
ceremony in Sydney.

Samaranch relinquished the post in 2001 and was replaced by
Rogge, a Belgian surgeon.

For 12 years through 1999, Samaranch was chairman of La
Caja de Ahorros y Pensiones de Barcelona SA, Spain’s largest
savings bank. He remained honorary chairman.

His wife, Maria Teresa Salisachs, died of cancer during the
2000 Sydney Games. They had a daughter, Maria Teresa, and a son,
Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., who was elected as an IOC member in
2001.